 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Okay, we're back, we're live, and we're talking about something very important. We're talking about the press here on Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel, and I have the honor to welcome Brett Opegaard of the University of Hawaii. He's an Associate Professor of Journalism in the School of Communications there. Welcome, again, yet. Yes. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. Yeah, so it's very important that we have this discussion. There's so many things flying around here at the beginning of the year, and somehow I think we have to take January 2nd as a kind of look down the field and try to figure out what's going to happen, not only in terms of the news, but the way the news is handled. So the first thing is you had an article last few days in Civil Beat, and you talked about the local press trying to maintain some standards, ethical standards that you felt were not necessarily being maintained these days. Tell us about the article and your view. Right. Well, the industry itself has a code of ethics. There are several code of ethics, actually, but the primary one is the Society of Professional and Journalist Code of Ethics. In the past, people have followed that within their newsrooms, but not really told the public much about it. My argument, basically, is we need to explain our code of ethics as journalists and then live up to those. That allows the readers, our viewers, our listeners to understand behind the scenes what we do and how we do it, and then if we don't follow that code, then we have to answer to them. Yeah. So what is missing now in the local view of this, the local implementation of the code? Well, there's a lot of haphazard type of application of, say, anonymity to sources or how people gather news, what stories they report on. It's just not explained very well to the audience why they're doing what they're doing, and it gives the impression of a lot of quid pro quo or cronyism within the media that I think would be primarily eliminated if you just explain why you're doing this and how you're doing it. So what the ideal, then, is I read any article in any local paper or any paper at all, and I come away with a sense. Or watch it on the broadcast news. Thank you, of course. Or on the internet. Or listen to it on the radio. Hawaii Public Radio. So I should come away with a feeling that they are representing me, that they're delving into these things on my behalf, that they're telling me a lot as much as they can. I don't know where the boundary is about the process of gathering that information and, you know, refining it and connecting it with other information. And I should feel the level of confidence that this particular news organization is really doing its job in terms of letting me see the process by which they have gathered and present this information. Absolutely. It should be very clear when you read or listen or watch a story where the information comes from. You know, it should be a properly sourced with a person's name and title, and you can either imagine they interviewed that person directly or the person provided a statement or whatever it is, and that should be made clear, too. A lot of times I've seen where press releases are turned into quotes without attribution to a press release, so it looks like somebody is talking to a news organization and they're really not, and there have been a couple notorious examples in the last year where a television station has received the same press release as everybody else, and they put it on their website and they'll say, Exclusive, you know, here's our scoop because, you know, we published the press release that everybody else got at the same time first. And that's the kind of shady behavior that I think would be eliminated with a more open and transparent process. Yeah. So what should they properly do? Because I mean, every significant company out there now has a PR firm or a PR communications director who writes press releases. Some of them are former journalists, by the way. They write very nice press releases, but they're written from the bias of that organization. It's not really reporting. It's advocating for the benefit of that organization. So now I'm going to send my press release into a publication, a news organization. And the news organization has to deal with that. So one is, I suppose, in a fully ethical and appropriate manner, they would assign that press release, if they thought it was important enough, to a reporter and he would call somebody or do some research or a combination of that. And he'd write the story that was fomented by that press release. Another possibility, which I think you're talking about, is you get the press release and you republish it. But I suppose the appropriate thing to say is, this is a press release from XYZ company. We're merely reprinting what they sent us. And the third, the worst example, is when you take the press release, make it your own story as if you're reporting on it. As if you did the research to validate what's in this advocating type, bias type press release. Right. Yeah. And that's because newsrooms are getting smaller and smaller and more and more strapped. A lot of people have started to do that as a regular part of their journalistic process, which it isn't and it shouldn't be. And I have a friend in another area that moved into a government agency. He was a former journalist for decades and he started, he asked the broadcast news to come out and do some reporting on the subject that he wanted, but they wouldn't come out. So he set up a tripod, filmed himself, answering questions that he created for himself, sent it into the television station and they broadcast it on the news as if they did that reporting. And that's the kind of stuff that happens all the time. The TV station knew that this was... The TV station knew, yeah, it was all part of the deal. Yeah. Like they didn't have to send their reporter out and... Yeah. It's all about money. Yeah, it's just very scandalous. And the answer is to be transparent, to say, if you're just going to quote a press release, say, in a press release, so and so, said such and such and just leave it at that. You don't have to see that though. You don't see that. And that's where the Code of Ethics would come into play. Yeah. And so my argument is each news organization... It doesn't have to be the SPJ Code of Ethics because there are several others, but they have to say, we follow a Code of Ethics. Here it is. Here's all the statements about anonymous sources or using press releases or reporting on someone else's story. That's another one I wrote a column about recently where one journalist in town would break a story and other people would come in and grab it for their own and basically start it on top of his shoulders and start reporting and then take over the story without giving the original person the credit for breaking it. So I mean, there's a lot of this behavior behind the scenes that does give sympathy to the idea that people criticize the media. And the idea that some news... I wouldn't use the term fake news, but I would say that there's better news and there's worse news and we should push for better news. Yeah. Well, suppose I give you a scenario, see what you think. I'm a struggling news organization. I don't have a lot of extra money. I don't have reporters, which I don't pay them very well anyway, but they're still expensive in a struggling organization. And I can't cover all these things. I get a press release. I have no knowledge of this and I have no reported or developed knowledge of this. Do I reprint the press release, I guess, with credit as that is the press release? Do I reprint the press release in the context of a kind of an opinion reaction and say, you know, gee whiz, I'm not sure this really works? Or do I ignore the whole story? Or do I have to save money? Well, it depends on the story. I mean, it depends on what the press release is about. There's every day, every news organization gets hundreds of press releases. So they're already filtering out the very best to acknowledge. I have another friend who used to work in newspapers and he became a PR person. He would write these press releases. And he told me that the dream scenario is for a media organization to just publish his press release as is. And he said he doesn't care if they put their byline on it or what. And so that's the kind of dynamic that you're dealing with in this basically grappling between public relations people and journalists. I mean, the public relations people want it. They don't want it to say it's a press release because of that diminishes it. So they're going to argue that they don't ever complain if you take it as is without giving them credit because that's what they want. They want it to basically be infiltrated into the news and appear as if a hardworking journalist vetted it in some way. That's deceptive because they haven't done the reporting. They haven't done the reporting. They haven't checked it out and called anybody, talked to anybody, verified anything. Yeah. I think the ideal, of course, is to put a journalist onto the story and have them report it fresh. Like you can use it as an idea and then start from there and start asking people questions about it. And if there's certain numbers or facts in there that the journalist wants to use and say according to a press release, blah, blah, blah, that's fine. But when it starts to just get dumped in, and this has happened in many news organizations locally, where they just dump it in and I've even written about people putting their own bylines on a press release, that's where you start to, the audience starts to lose trust. And really journalists have nothing but their integrity, that's the only capital they have. And the news organization allows them to do that. Is it possible that the journalist would do that? He would sort of steal the press release, put his own byline on it, not say anything? Can the editor know? It's hard to say if the editor would know because it depends on how the relationship between the editor and the reporter. But certainly everybody else who got the press release would know. And that's how I would find out about these stories. Somebody calls him on it. Yeah, somebody calls him on it. Some other news organization says, hey, I got this press release. I got the same one. Yeah, I got the same one. It has this person's byline on it. This is, you know, and that's part of the role that I have at Civil Beat is bringing these things to the attention of the public because there really isn't anybody else in the area that writes about these kinds of issues. And before I did it, that same scenario would have went unchecked. Well, something you've said a number of times, and that is the little papers, the ones who don't have the money for original news, and the big papers, it's a big disparity now in getting bigger. And the ones, the smaller ones going out of business and the bigger ones are left as the only ones really the only significant original news, newspapers, news organizations on the field. And it's changed. Am I right? It's changed in the past few years. The little ones are going out of business, and the big ones find that they're the other ones left, you know, a number of less fewer Indians, so to speak, on the field. Yeah, it's really the very smallest, like the weeklies, are doing okay. The small dailies are doing okay because nobody else is reporting about those. It's more of the regional dailies that used to be prominent journalistic forces in the country. You know, the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, the New Orleans paper went out of business or dropped down to several or went from daily to, you know, a couple times a week. And all these have been severely damaged. So basically you have the biggest in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, et cetera, doing a lot of original work. And then you have the very smallest, but we've lost really kind of that middle class of journalists. Yeah. So you get the times, I mean, the internet has changed things too. It doesn't get the times on the internet for probably the same price that I would pay for a local smaller, less effective newspaper. So I'd rather actually read the times. The problem is I don't get the local news that way or the regional news is the case may be. So there's a black hole there is a vacuum for the local news and I lose something because what do they say? All news is local. All politics is local anyway. So you know, do you see a change in that? I can get the national news. I can get it from nationally respected newspapers and talk about who they might be, but I can't get local news the same way and I can't get it on the internet and I can't get it original and I can't get it clean of articles that are really press releases. Yeah. The term that has emerged is called a news desert and people are living in these news deserts where it'll be no original news within hundreds of miles of them. I mean, literally. Now you can look on a map and what happens then is people do go to the national news but if they have to say low media literacy and end up at say a bright barred or some skewed site like that then their whole world gets distorted dramatically and they have no local checks and balances, nobody to really say there's another side to the story. So important that we have good news. Let's take a short break. Brett Obergaard, associate professor of journalism at the School for Communications at UH Minoa talking about how the war will get to this right after the break. How the war and the press has affected. The press will be right back. Aloha Kakao. I am Andrea. I am from Italy and I've been studying and working here in Hawaii for more than three years for my PhD. Hawaii is home to a truly fantastic community of middle and high school students and did you know some of them are currently out there right now using their free time to invent new quantum computers and did you know some of them are exploring cybersecurity and the new frontiers of robotics. I am just always amazed as I talk to them at science fairs. Oh, but there's more. Did you know that these students are coming here on FinTech, Hawaii to share their story with us? Come and join the new young talents making way show and discover how these students are shaping our future. Starting on February the 6th every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Only here at FinTech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Okay, as you may know, we're here with Community Matters. I'm Jake Feisel. It's Tuesday the 2nd. And we are joined by Brett Obergaard, Associate Professor of Journalism at UH Minoa. So we were talking before about the Sahara, if you will. What did Sahara, the Beaux-Arts, HL Menken in the New York 30s. So this is the Sahara of the news. How does that affect the bubble process and the polarization process where people are in great disagreement about views that they could not understand the other guy's views? They don't accept any view, but they're wrong. Well, I think it pushes people to the national bubbles as opposed to the local community paper used to be the place where everybody in the town would share that news and talk about it at the local diner or at the local bar or whatever. And without that, I think it isolates people into the national bubbles even more than before. And we end up with folks that really just can't tolerate or talk to each other. Yeah. Well, talking to each other seems to be part of the Ben Franklin democracy we all got started with here. Yeah. And that you have to have local discussions with your friends and neighbors and test your ideas out here, their ideas, and ultimately form opinions that you can make intelligent votes and participate in the civic process. And if you don't have those conversations, democracy suffers over it. If you only have bubbles, it doesn't work as well. Yeah. And if it's really easy to demonize the national figures, Trump or Pelosi or whoever, and view them as non-human demons, and what we really need is people who disagree at a local level start the conversation and say, well, what do you think about this issue? Why do you think that? And then try to find common ground. Not easy, but try to find common ground. And a newspaper, local newspaper, helps you do that. I mean, a good one. Yeah. Because it's actually in the world of the bubble in the past year anyway. People on one side of the bubble or the other don't talk to each other. They don't want to get into an argument. Oh, they hate each other. They hate each other. It's not even... Shut down. Yeah. I mean, it's like take people off your friend list on Facebook and take them off your Christmas card list. It's just not the sound of a good democracy. So let's talk about the... This is a hard question that we have in front of us here. How does the war of the press, Trump's war on the press, affect the press? He's into fear and bullying, and he creates fear in the press or tries to, and he does bully them as he does a lot of people in the world. How does that affect the way the press works in this country? Well, I think journalism over the past several decades before Trump had gotten, at least from maybe like late Watergate to free Trump, had gotten kind of soft and lazy to be frank. And I think this has exposed really a lot of the weaknesses of journalism. And I guess I would say that it certainly is rooting out the weakest parts of the system where only the strong are surviving. Now how can... What does strong mean in this context? Well, I would say the strong with the most resources, the most of a foundation in journalism as opposed to a foundation in selling advertising. I think that's really a big difference in how some media organizations operate. Ones that are just in it to make a buck, you know, like the people who have been bought up by GANED or some of these other chains that really it's all about the profit margin. Those are the ones that just are getting wiped out because they can't go back to their journalistic ideology of what they're there for in the first place. They're there for journalism. They're not there to sell advertisements. Yeah. So we have to make distinction. Yeah. And I suppose, you know, the media has shown us what was the paper in Boston, the Boston Globe. I think it's a subsidiary of the New York Times. It was. And I guess it's sold. I don't think they are now. And it was called Spotlight. And it was a story of abuse in the church. And the paper kept on investigating, ultimately broke the story and changed things at least in Boston in the church. And then, of course, you know, this newspaper movie called The Post by Steven Spielberg dealing with the Pentagon Papers is just coming out in a few weeks. I think it's not quite out yet. That's going to be very interesting because that's about Catherine Graham, the same lady who stood firm on Watergate, the same kind of issue. She went through revealing the Pentagon Papers even under threat of prosecution. She might have gone to jail over that, but she cut New Turf and defended the paper and took the right position. And, of course, this thing in The Morning Times, today, The New York Times, by A.C. Salzberger, author of C. Salzberger, who's the new publisher of The Times. And actually, you know him, you've had experiences with him. Wonderful guy. Yeah. Very excited for him. And he wrote the manifesto of how he feels about The Times. It's really worth taking a look at. He talks about independence, how important it is for a newspaper to be independent. He talks about serving the public. He talks about avoiding stories and the perception of being afraid of fear or giving favor to certain interests. Yeah. It's all about independence. One word. It's all about independence. And so The Times has to be one of the big ones you talked about. And The Globe, I'm not sure who owns it or what the control is. I'm not sure I include the Wall Street Journal, although it's being sold lately. And of course, I do include the Washington Post. But how many others are like that, where the giants, where they can stand up against government? Yeah. I mean, USA Today has never won a Pulitzer Prize. They're no bastion of journalism. So you really have very few. And what I think we've discovered in the past few years is that, you know, if you commoditize journalism and make it into every town, has the same stories, every town has the same, you know, approach, then it'll just die. There's no, like I said, there's no strength to that. And what they need is to go back to the foundations of what, you know, at least 20th century journalism was about, which is finding out information that other people in power don't want you to know, and sharing it with the people who need it. And that, you know, we've kind of lost our way in a lot of respects, becoming entertainment or, you know, publishing press releases or whatever it is that paid the bills, instead of really focusing on what journalism is. Well, this certainly brings to mind all those TV news programs, including both sides of the fence. You know, Fox News is probably the worst offender of the manifesto and the ethics. And then you have CNN, which actually is sort of the mirror image of the same kind of thing and MSNBC, the same kind of thing. Are they doing their job? How would you compare them, you know, with AC Solisberger and the New York Times? Well, MSNBC is what I would say is kind of the mirror of Fox, although they do a lot of things better than Fox. PNN is supposed to be in the middle, but I think one of the big problems with PNN and all these networks is they're really about making money instead of getting to the bottom of things. You know, CNN's classic setup is put five people at a table. You have two on the left, two on the right, one kind of sane voice in the middle, and let them banter for an hour, and then we'll sell a bunch of ads. You know, that's not really what I would consider great journalism. And that's where they have to put, I think, you know, CNN and a lot of them really have to look in the mirror and say, what are we really doing here? Is it likely that somebody else is going to come up on that stage, another news show, one of the big news organizations come out and do better on television? Well, definitely on the internet. There have been a lot of startups that have done a lot better, you know, Vice and Fox, and there's all sorts of, you know, basically competitors for that space. They're much smaller, but they do a better job with the journalism part. Now, will they, you know, ever make as much money as CNN, I doubt it, but maybe that's not the point. The point is, are they giving better journalism, better information to people for our democracy and strengthening our democracy, and in a lot of respects they're doing that? Yeah. Problem, at the end of the day, though, you have to have somebody, whether it's the Times or the Globe or the Post, who has the money, the resources to send investigative reporters out there to do original reporting, because that's the kind that counts. So many other papers just deal on somebody else's original reporting. They never really know whether the original reporting that they're using is actually correct. They just buy it, kind of thing, and that's dangerous too, isn't it? Well, they create a lot of meta-narratives that never get checked, and that's become a big problem. You think about our wars, for example. The meta-narrative is that we're always surging and winning, but after 13, 15, whatever, how many years, it's probably not the real narrative. The real narrative is that this was a failed idea from the beginning, and no matter how much we put into it, we're going to never succeed. That's where the standing on shoulders problem really manifests itself. If somebody publishes a piece with original reporting, and then people are always stacking on top of each other, they're not going back to recheck their assumptions from the beginning, and you can imagine the skew that you would get from it. Dangerous. Yeah. But if I were Trump, and I would try to beat off anybody who attacks me, I would beat off the guys who do the original news and the in-depth reporting. If I discredit them, then I'm way ahead, because everybody else is buying their stuff, and then I wind up discrediting everybody down-line as well as The New York Times. So it's a smart strategy, and if he can ultimately discredit The New York Times, we're all in a confusion about fake news and discredited news. This is very troubling. It's only smart if you think the fascism strategy is a good one. If you think the strongest democracy is where we're really going to succeed, then it's a terrible strategy. So it's like one of those, again, the meta-narratives that people play out is the idea is Trump should win. Well, no, he shouldn't win. Democracy should win, because that's much more important than any one person. And therefore, a lot of times people get into his tactics and strategies about the media and miss the bigger point is the president of the United States is attacking the First Amendment of our Constitution. Yeah. Well, the president, I've thought about this, too, for the president of the United States to attack the press, that is to attack the First Amendment, is a violation of constitutional principles. It's a violation of the oath that he took on the first day. Yeah. And it's very dangerous for the country and the democracy and the way forward. So what, you know, if you look at Salzburgers' statement this morning in The Times, he says exactly what I would want him to say, and essentially, without going into a lot of criticism over Trump, he's just saying, we're going to stay the course. You can trust us. Yeah. We're going to follow the rules. We're going to follow the ethical codes. We're not going to be swayed by fear or favor. We're going to be independent. Because recognizing that they're an original news source, this has huge effect not only for their readers, but the readers of every publication that repeats them. Right. So for the moment, we feel safe. But downline, how safe do you feel, all of that considered? Well, I don't feel safe at all unless every media organization makes a similar pledge. You know, I asked the 10 biggest media organizations in Oahu what code of ethics they followed. And several of them didn't follow any, and several didn't answer. So what concerns me is that, you know, if we have put all our eggs in the New York Times basket, it's great. We have the New York Times and the Washington Post and some of the other CBS News or whatever. But we really need to develop it all the way through from the small players, the weeklies, the small dailies, the tabloids, all the way up through the regionals to the big players. Because really, if you look at the ecosystem, the New York Times doesn't report stories outside of, say, New York and L.A. and some of the big areas. All that other news from the rest of the country comes from those smaller papers. And without those, we really even get funneled more and more into a New York-centric viewpoint. Which is not really the view we want to have a broader array of sources and views. Well, diversity is the strength of this country. And without it, I don't care what, you know, what monolithic idea comes forth, it's not going to be good for us. So if I tell you, I'm the president and I tell you, look, I found a mistake in one of your stories. I found a reporter who did not conduct himself properly. And I take you to task on anything I find. And I'm watching you every day. I have my legions of people watching you to see if they can find a mistake. What effect does that have on the Times or any other original source? What I worry about is that they'll become reserved, reticent. They won't report a story they're not really quite sure about. They'll take a position that'll be more conservative, more self-preservation, if you will, not take any risks, require too much verification, who knows what. So that we just don't get the information. Is that a possible effect of this war on the press? It's highly likely. And I've seen it in newsrooms I worked in on a much smaller scale where a local auto dealer doesn't want a story about pinto's blowing up or something. Even though it has nothing to do with it, they don't sell pinto's. They just don't want cars blowing up on the newspaper. And that's always part of the story as the outside influences, which is why the New York Times statement is so powerful that we're not serving those people. We're serving our readers and our readers' interests as number one in our minds. So you and I have discussed this before and it seems to me that it's building up to more than it was. This issue is now, we now know the outlines are becoming more clear of what we have here, the war on the press and the way it works in this country, the way the press is evolving these days, or devolving is the case, maybe. And I wonder, you know, the burden is still on the individual citizen, to do his duty as a citizen, to be informed, to have those engagements and conversations and learn and form good opinions so he can vote properly. So at this point in time, January 2nd, Brett, there's camera one. What's your advice to the public, to the reading public, to the citizenry, the electorate, the voters, what's your advice? Find lots of sources and check everything you read. You know, especially the more important the story is to you, the more you should check it and that's really what it's all about. I will say a couple of things about the responsibility of citizen. It is a responsibility of citizen, but there's also a systemic responsibility for the country to teach citizens how to be citizens. And there have been a couple of recent laws passed requiring media literacy in state education curriculums. And I think that's something, kind of like you lose PE, you lose home act, you know, you don't have media literacy and suddenly you have to go out for every meal, you have to buy your, you know, you get a rip in your shirt, you got to buy a new one. I mean, all these things are systemic issues. I think if you can't understand how the media works, then you can't really function outside of its, you know, say advertising paradigm, they want to sell you things. And you know, it's a really important part. And also, I wanted to circle back to one thing you said about people watching the journalists making sure they do things right. They should watch the journalists. They should make sure they do things right. It should be 100% true every story. And if they're not true, that's what the whole correction mechanism is for. So, and the New York Times does a great job of this. They've made corrections 100 years later, you know, they've made corrections whenever they find out something's wrong. So, the journalists should publish things that they are confident is true. They get it wrong. It doesn't matter if it's a source. It doesn't matter if like, oh, that's too bad. That really hurts my feelings that I got that wrong. There's lots of ways to get things wrong. You know, a source can tell you wrong things, but you're corrected. And that's the bargain with your reader. Bargain with a reader is, I'm going to tell you everything is true. I'm going to tell you how I do it. And when I get it wrong, I'm going to correct it. Just as the citizen has a relationship with government and government has a relationship with the citizen, the citizen has a relationship with the press and the press has a relationship with the citizen. Yeah. Thank you so much, Brett Obergaard. Oh, thank you again. Professor Journalism at UH Spedola.